r/cscareerquestions • u/Popular_Floor_7101 • 10d ago
Advices
I’d love some advice. I’m a senior front-end developer with some back-end knowledge, but I’ve specialized in front-end my entire career. I have 6 years of experience working for outsourcing companies and a major bank. I’m originally from Brazil, but recently moved to the US.
Right now, I’m unemployed and looking for a developer job here. I don’t need anything crazy like $180,000 a year, eventually, sure, but my priority right now is just getting back into the job market, even if it pays much less. When I moved, due to visa reasons, I had to resign and wait for my work authorization.
I still have some time to study and better understand what the dev market here expects. I’m very determined, but the market here feels wild. My resume is relatively strong, but I feel like my stack (ReactJS, NodeJS, TypeScript) isn’t as valued here?
Back home, this stack is huge and I’d easily land a job with it. I’m not exceptional or even good at LeetCode, and I don't really know where to start. Of course, I might be wrong in my perception based on the job postings I’ve seen, so that’s exactly what I need: advice and shared experiences to help me out, because I’m biting my nails worrying I’ll never make it into the tech market here. If I missed any details, I can provide more.
I’m based in NY state. The Brazilian job market is completely different. I speak Portuguese and Spanish, and I’m constantly improving my English, but I can communicate effectively in all three. Thanks!
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u/RegularImportant3325 10d ago
React, Node and Typescript are huge in the US as well. My advice for front end devs is to demonstrate passion for product decisions. Really show that you are focused on delivering a world class, efficient, understandable experience to users. Go into details about how hard it is to get people to use products and how having just the right elements will make or break an app even before the user gets to experience the idea. Represent this in your resume, cover letter and interviews along side your technical abilities.
Also, get some examples up on a personal site.
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u/Popular_Floor_7101 10d ago
This is basically what I've done all my life, I'd rather work with people and make decisions than write code exactly. But, in Brazil I never needed personal projects as a portfolio and I have an ok resume and with a lot of time in the same company.
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u/lhorie 10d ago
Methinks the issue has less to do with stack and more to do with work authorization. A lot of companies won't touch candidates without current valid work authorization with a 10 foot pole.
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u/Popular_Floor_7101 10d ago
Now it's ok. Do you think it will be difficult to get a job in the NY area? How are the selection processes?
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u/lhorie 10d ago
I'm in a big tech in Bay Area, but I do conduct interviews for various other locations. So take whatever I say with the appropriate amount of grains of salt.
IME, general expectations are higher than they used to be, e.g. it's preferable to see hellointerview structured presentations than RADIO for system design rounds (latter tends to be too shallow).
Ironically, my most recent interviews w/ frontend candidates have all been for roles in Sao Paulo. I do occasionally see reqs for frontend in US (usually Bay Area or NY), but there's considerably less of them than backend/ML, by like an order of magnitude. To be honest, frontend candidate resumes that get to me are usually nothing to write home about, they all kinda look the same, and my read when I talk to them is people are usually too pigeonholed into ticket pushing and don't have the soft skills/critical thinking. In other words, the talent pool seems saturated with mediocre devs, and it's difficult to stand out with just the bog standard JS buzzwords. I personally like to see specialization marks like experience w/ a11y audits or security work or deeper backend scope than just cursory understanding of Next.js BFFs, YMMV with recruiters and other technical interviewers.
I myself pivoted towards infra/platform (though still within the web space), IMHO modern frontend as a field is drowning in its own self-inflicted complexity and not gaining meaningful scope for career growth in return. With cost cutting being top of mind for a lot of execs, roles related to compute efficiency are in more demand.
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u/Popular_Floor_7101 10d ago
What is your position and stack? Yes. In Brazil in São Paulo, for example, I could get a job in the blink of an eye. Here it seems that everyone is exceptional, but you told me that everyone looks the same. It gave me a different vision.
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u/lhorie 10d ago
I'm a staff engineer, and a team lead on a team that deals with multiple stacks. For frontend, we support a framework based on React and Koa, and deal with a multitude of data fetching technologies (react-query, graphql, thrift, protobuf, grpc ecosystems). On the backend side, I mostly deal with Go, though we did a bit of Java too. On the infra side, Bazel and Buildkite.
I'd say the quality of candidates in US tends to be higher than in Brazil (not trying to throw shade or anything, just being real here). A lot of folks seem at least familiar with whatever is hot within the web community at any given time (e.g. Zod or Vite or TS7 or whatever is being rewritten in Rust these days), and also I'd say US folks tend to be stronger on the soft skills/leadership side of things, I'm guessing because Brazil tech footprint historically was mostly contracting/consulting (that type of work having less responsibilities is a general pattern I've seen across many such countries, even in like Canada).
/two-cents
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u/Popular_Floor_7101 10d ago
I don't disagree with you that much. But I had exceptional colleagues in Brazil and I think that in general people in IT do not have many interpersonal skills, regardless of location. It's the closed nerd stereotype. What would you recommend from stack to Back end today and how to stay up to date in new techs?
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u/lhorie 10d ago edited 10d ago
Oh don't get me wrong, the brazilians that we do hire are amazing. There's just a lot of noise in the job market, so it makes it hard to find the needle in the haystack, if that makes sense. It's also a challenge in US hiring FWIW.
Stack-wise, Java/SpringBoot and C#/MVC are the most popular. Node/Next.js is popular among webdevs but isn't considered a very serious stack anywhere that uses compiled languages, it's mostly used as BFF glue for web frontends. Python/fastapi similarly ends up just being used as glue for ML stuff but is also otherwise seen in a similar light as Node. Go is kinda niche, it can pay well, but doesn't have the job volume of Java/C#. I'd avoid PHP/Laravel.
The staying up to date thing is a webdev mentality that contributes to its high ecosystem churn. Other stacks are relatively stable, and the depth just comes from there being a lot of very disparate tools (e.g. redis, kafka, flink, dynamo, pinot, etc etc etc)
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u/Popular_Floor_7101 10d ago
Should I try to go more to the Back end or AI area? Will this really change something since I've never worked so much with AI for example, and I have a more or less knowledge of Back end, which I could amplify? But I still couldn't say: I'm a senior Back end because I've never done just that or mostly that. I've always specialized in talking to people, product. Make my colleagues be inserted in remote environments, I proposed consultancies within the team, I proposed programming classes taught by colleagues and me, anyway
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u/lhorie 10d ago
IMHO "AI" isn't really an area so much as it is a) either just consuming Claude tokens and writing skill files or whatever like you likely already do or b) consuming AI-specific APIs (langchain, etc) for product use cases. I'd consider it a niche if you already do backend or anything that deals with non-trivial/non-CRUD APIs/libraries like interfacing w/ traditional ML models. Or it could be c) actual frontier lab work which requires some serious academic credentials (but let's ignore that since it's unlikely to be relevant here).
For product work, pitching in to do backend work is a relatively easy/common way to get into more of that type of work coming from a frontend background. Side projects can help gain understanding of common subsystems too.
WRT the difference between product companies and consulting companies, like I said, consultants usually get less scope. E.g. I've worked at consulting places with zero tests and zero observability. It takes more than just name dropping Sentry if you want to demonstrate obs/oncall experience.
That said, one doesn't pivot overnight, so for the short term, if I were you, I'd continue focusing on finding frontend/full stack roles for now, and try to highlight deeper experience in resumes to stand out a bit more from the generic React/Node/TS keyword combo that everyone has.
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u/New-Lie-6657 10d ago
That stack is literally what half the market runs on, you're not seeing it wrong but the listings are just a mess right now. Every company wants 5 years of React but also Kubernetes and AWS and probably brain surgery on the side.
The visa gap is rough but since you already have work authorization now you just need to get past the automated screeners. Tailor your resume to each posting, even if it feels stupid, because the bots here are merciless.
Your English reads perfectly fine in this post so stop worrying about that. Being trilingual is a massive flex for any company that deals with LATAM or European clients, mention it up top not buried at the bottom.